“Life,” a new science fiction horror movie that recently opened, is apparently a remake of “Alien” only set on the international space station. A Mars sample return mission delivers a single cell organism from Mars for the folks on the ISS to study safe beyond the confines of Earth. The organism grows and starts eating the astronauts.
An excellent story in the Verge describes all the things that are wrong with the movie, primarily details about the ISS that were gussied up and procedures depicted that the real NASA would never do but need to happen for the film to proceed.
In the latter case in seems that the astronauts forget everything that is known about biological containment and protecting the Earth’s environment from alien life.
“Life” is not the only space movie to ignore reality for the good of the film. “Gravity” did violence to everything known about orbital mechanics, but Sandra Bullock looked divine careening through space. Even the greatest space movie of the current century, “The Martian,” was premised on a sandstorm on Mars that even the author of the book admits could not happen. But Matt Damon was great in the tale of survival on the Red Planet.
“Life,” however, is a classic, by the numbers horror feature about a big evil that kills off the cast one by one.
If could be a chainsaw wielding maniac carving up horny teenagers or a mama aliens slaughtering the hapless crew of an interstellar tramp freighter. In this movie, it’s a Martian with a hunger for Earth primates. Why it should find a species from another planet desirable for dinner is something that someone versed in astrobiology could best explain.
Real life space adventures don’t get a lot of films made of them, partly because NASA strives to make them as boring (i.e. without disaster) as possible. A reason exists that Ron Howard made “Apollo 13” about the one lunar mission that almost didn’t make it back and not about any of the other voyages to the moon which went off nary without a hitch.
Filmmakers think they have to have someone in peril for a movie to work. That is why it is unlikely that something real that happened on the ISS, a scientific discovery say, is not likely to make it to the bug screen.
